MARIE CURIE AND HER TRAGIC LIFE
Hello friends welcome to the session. Today we will discuss
about Marie Curie and her tragic life.
So without late lets go the topic.
In 1927, 29 of the top physicists gathered at the prestigious Solvay Conference in Brussels, the only woman in attendance was Marie Curie, she had a lot of firsts, she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize.
The first person to
win the Nobel Prize twice in the first person to win in two different fields
and Curie was best known for her work in radioactivity, which would save a
million lives during the First World War, but would ultimately take her out.
Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea
Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, then under the control of the Russian Empire,
on 7 November 1867 She was the youngest child of teachers, her mother
Bronislawa Sklodowaka us would was the head teacher of a prestigious boarding
school for girls.
Her father Wladyslaw Sklodowski, taught physics
and math and was proud of his Polish heritage as a result of his patriotism,
his Russian supervisors forced him into lower paying positions, he also lost
his savings through a bad investment to support their five children, they had
to take in student borders, and this would be fatal.
Maria's eldest sibling, her sister Zofia, caught typhus from one of the lodgers and died. A few years
later when Maria was 10 her mother died of tuberculosis, the tragedies caused
Maria to give up Catholicism the faith of her mom and become agnostic.
Her father wouldn't
forgive himself for losing his family's savings. However, his children would
remember him as the man who nurtured them emotionally and intellectually, Maria
finished high school at the top of her class but wasn't allowed to attend university
because she was a woman.
The Russian Empire
banned women from getting a university education. So she and her sister Bronislawa,
enrolled in the secretive flying university or floating University in Warsaw,
named after the ever changing location of classes to avoid the watchful eye of
czarist authorities.
Her sister then left
for medical school in Paris, Maria hope to eventually join her the two a pact:
Maria would support her sister's studies in Paris, and Bronya would return the
favor in the future. So from the age of 17, Maria worked as a governess tutor
and also studied in her spare time.
While working for
relatives the Zorawskis, she fell in
love with their son Kazimierz who would become a mathematician, but the
Zorawskis didn't approve of her because she didn't have a penny to rename. He
was said that as an old man kazimierz would sit contemplatively before the
statue of her in front of the Research Institute, she went on to found.
In 1891, When Maria
was 24. She finally had the means to join her sister in Paris, and now use the
name, Marie. She enrolled at the University of Paris, known as the Sorbonne,
where she studied physics and mathematics. At first she lived in the home of
her sister who was now married, But later opted to rent a little attic closer
to the university. She often stayed at the heated library until closing rather
than spend the evening in her unheated room.
Her earlier education
had been insufficient so there was a lot of catching up to do. She sometimes
worked so hard she forgot to eat in would pass out. Despite the difficulties,
Maria marveled at her freedom writing, it was like a new world open to me, the
world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.
She earned a degree in physics and then another in
mathematics, she planned on returning to Poland, but then Pierre Curie came
into her life, he was 8 years older, a well-known physicist, and an outsider
who was educated by his father in his teens, they were introduced by a mutual
friend who knew marine needed lab space for research and Pierre headed a
laboratory of the School of Industrial physics and chemistry.
Where engineers were trained, Murray would see if he had
dedicated his life to his dream of science, he felt the need of a companion who
could live his dream with him, and he hoped that companion would be her. But
Marie turned down his marriage proposal.
Since her plan was to return to her native country, however
she learned that it wouldn't be possible to start a career in Poland, when she
went back to visit her family during summer break in 1894, Krakow University
denied her job as professor because she was a woman, Pierre convinced her to come back to Paris to pursue a PhD.
She insisted that he
too, get his doctorate, which he did pioneering research on magnetism. They
married in 1895 at the town hall in Sceaux
in the suburbs of Paris, Partners in life and in science, Marie wore a dark
blue outfit on her wedding day, that would become her trademark in the
laboratory, they bought bicycles with the money they received as a wedding
gift, their way of relaxing in a life otherwise filled with research.
Marie Curie would earn
her Doctor of Science degree from the Sorbonne
in 1903. She did her thesis on radiation which was recently discovered in
uranium by Henri Becquerel. Curie was intrigued by mega has discovery and
investigated further. She used in electrometer invented by her husband and his
brother to measure radioactivity in many substances and materials.
She realized through her experiments that radiation was a
property of the element of uranium. Yet when she observed the mineral
pitchblende which primarily contains uranium, she noticed it was far more
radioactive than uranium could explain how could this be, it would only be
possible if there were something else in the pitchblende. Pierre was so
intrigued that he dropped his own work to join her in their search, they ground
up 10s of pitch blind and discovered an element that was 400 times more
radioactive than uranium, polonium, named after her country of birth, and then
they discovered another element and I gave off 900 times more radiation than
polonium: radium, the unglamorous work of extracting and isolating the elements
took place in a leaky and drafty shack and your pals work as they didn't have a
dedicated lab space.
Their efforts paid off
the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 went to Marie, Pierre and Bequerel for the
research in radiation. French academics originally proposed that only Pierre
and Becquerel had received the prize, leaving Marie out. A sign of the times,
however a sympathetic member of the nominating committee, Swedish mathematician,
Gosta Mittage-Leffler situation. He
insisted that his wife, shared the honor, Marie
Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
She and her husband were too busy with their research to
accept the award in person in Stockholm. Pierre was also sick, suffering from
pain and fatigue. They had no idea at the time that radiation could be detrimental
to their health. It is said that Marie would carry tubes of radium in their
pockets. She was fascinated by what she described as faint fairy lights. Little
did she know this was slowly killing her.
The glowing green radium captivated the public, it would be a
key element in early cancer treatment, and would also find its way into
everyday products toothpaste with the promise of benefiting teeth and facial
creams in the belief that it would for muscles and smooth out wrinkles, the
element was so popular that in the 1920s, a single gram of radium costs more
than $100,000, well over a million today.
The Curies could have tried to patent radium and cash in big
time, But they did it, Murray declared radium is a chemical element, a property
of all humans. After their groundbreaking work, it was Pierre, who would be
promoted as head of the physics department at the Sorbonne.
Yet he still didn't have a proper lab Pierre complaint in the
university relented, however, he would never get his dream of working in a new laboratory,
because tragedy struck less than two years after the birth of their second
daughter.
On a rainy day in April 1906 Pierre was walking across the Rue
Dauphine when he was run over by horse and carriage, he died instantly. Pierre’s
father implied that his son's preoccupation with his own thoughts contributed
to his death. Marie was offered his academic posts to the south but instead of
accepting a widow's pension, she became the first female professor in France,
hundreds of people lined up outside the university hoping to attend her first
lecture, the period following her husband's death would be the most difficult
of her life.
In 1911, the French Academy of Sciences, the
gathering place for prominent scientists rejected her for membership, when she
put herself forward for a vacant seat they he passed her over for physicist and
inventor, a while from the home, many suspected it was because she was an
immigrant and a woman. Despite getting snubbed by the Academy, she went on to
win something even greater. Later that year.
A second Nobel Prize,
this time in chemistry for the discovery of polonium and radium, the isolation
of radium in the study of the nature of that remarkable element, but the buzz
around her was in great, the French press was all over her affair with her
husband's former student, physician Paul
Langevin, who was married but estranged from his wife.
She was labeled as a
homewrecker and even warned that it might be best if she didn't pick up the
prize in person, Curie sank into a deep depression, only to be slowly pulled
out, with the support of a fellow scientist, Albert Einstein struck up a friendship with Korea, the first Solvay
Conference in 1911.
He wrote her letter of
encouragement during this dark period, I am impelled to tell you how much I've
come to admire your intellect, your drive and your honesty. He then told her to
pay no mind to the stories in the press, simply don't read that hogwash, Curie
went to Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize and the headlines about the
affair eventually blew over, she would slowly recover, it was in the middle of
setting up a giant laboratory under a newly created radium Institute.
When war broke out as
German troops headed toward Paris, she took her stash of precious radium to a
bank vault in Bordeux, in
southwestern France, the new capital. She also tried to sell her two gold Nobel
Prize medals to help the war effort, but the national bank refused to accept
them. She would buy war bonds using her prize money, but this self-sacrifice,
wasn't enough for her.
She was determined to use her research to save the lives of
French soldiers, she had studied the work of German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, who had discovered X-rays, Curie that brought X-ray
machines to the battlefield by inventing mobile units called “Little curries” to help surgeons locate
and remove shrapnel and bullets from wounded soldiers.
She and her daughter Irene trained 150 women to drive these
little cars and drove on herself. Despite the danger, Curie also oversaw 200
radiological rooms in field hospitals, it's estimated that by the end of the
war. Her efforts saved the lives of a million men but may have cost her own.
Curie knew that
overexposure to X-rays would pose risks to her health, but there wasn't any
time to improve on safety practices, years later, she would die of a plastic
anemia, a blood disease is likely due to exposure to large amounts of radiation
over her lifetime.
Despite her humanitarian efforts the French government never
gave her any official recognition, whereas she was gaining increasing fame
abroad, in 1921, US President Warren Harding invited her to the White House,
and gave her a gift of a gram of radium, to aid in her research, the French
government was apparently embarrassed by the fact that they gave her no
distinctions, so before that trip to DC, they offered her the country's most
distinguished honor the Legion d’Honneur,-the
Legion honor.
She declined during
her later years, she headed the radium Institute, later the Curie Institute in
Paris, and open another in Warsaw, where sister, Bronya became the director. Both
remain major research institutions, to this day, she was already in ill health
by that. On July 4, 1934 Curie died at
the age of 66 at a sanatorium in the town of Passy in eastern France.
She didn't live to see
her daughter Irene, when her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A year later, for
the artificial creation of new radioactive elements, sharing it with her husband,
physicist Frederic Joliot, Curie was buried at a cemetery in Scaux, the suburbs
of Paris, where she married, and her husband lay.
In 1995, both were
moved to the Pantheon in Paris, the resting place for many distinguished French
citizens like Victor Hugo, Rousseau and Voltaire. Curie was the first woman to
be honored in the Pontheon on her own merits, who remains remained radioactive
so they were placed in a coffin lined with nearly an inch of lead, even her
papers are still radioactive today, anyone who wants to examine them must wear
protective gear in sign a waiver.
Curies tireless work
was surpassed only by her fight to overcome the barriers in her way to become
one of the greatest scientists of all time. It wasn't only her work that was
impressive but also her work ethic.
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